June 2023

Embedding School-wide Pedagogy as a beginning teacher Ms Sandra Vecchio, Biology Teacher

This article discusses the ever-presence of cultural forces within a science learning space and delves into the personal experiences of a beginning teacher’s implementation of thinking routines in an array of science disciplines across different year levels.

Leveraging cultural forces as a beginning teacher Leaving university and entering employment as a beginning teacher is an exciting transition. You enter the teaching profession with some of the tools you require to thrive in the form of well-renowned scholarly literature, such as John Hattie’s Visible Learning Theory (2008) and Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983). The profession is truly multifaceted, and the more time you invest in understanding these facets, the more tools you seem to acquire. Teaching is a profession that requires adaptability, a passion for the subject area, and an eagerness to continue learning. Just like the young minds we teach, a beginning teacher conducts learning experientially through iterations of doing a learning routine, reflecting on its effectiveness, and applying improvements in future practice (Moon, 2004). There may be no explicit manual to becoming a ‘good’ teacher, but there are certainly forces that can be leveraged to harness the learning potential in each learning environment. Having a general awareness of these cultural forces within your learning space is a precursor to doing a thinking routine that harnesses their power to make learning and thinking visible.

Creating Cultures of Thinking, rather than prioritising work

The construction of knowledge in science is stimulated by students’ attitudes, interests, and engagement, as well as the quality of instruction. Interestingly, the quality and quantity of instruction, either behavioural (how students learn) or content based (what students learn), are not always directly correlated (Milner, 2008). For this reason, science educators should strive to create a learning environment that prioritises students’ learning over the traditional classroom culture of simply completing work. As a science educator, it can be easy to inhibit the creation of a culture of thinking by failing to appreciate that students are perfectly capable of constructing their own knowledge through meaningful collaboration with their peers (Vygotsky, 1978). Thinking routines are content-free scaffolds that allow students to structure their thinking about concepts and content, share ideas in group settings, and make their thinking visible. When executed successfully, thinking routines are very much learning-oriented. They allow the educator to find a suitable balance between scaffolding learning and reducing the quantity of instruction given, which creates a learning space desirable for harnessing the power of the cultural forces (Ritchhart, 2015). In this way, the completion of work is merely a byproduct of the learning that has taken place. Authenticity was achieved in my thinking routines by establishing a foundation that provokes an inquisitive classroom environment and recognising the evidence-based nature of thinking like a true scientist (Venville et al., 2019).

School-wide Pedagogy Newsletter June Edition 2023

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